Who writes this stuff? John J. McKay is an underemployed, grumpy, and aging liberal who lives in a small house with his clever wife, two cats, and a couple thousand books. He is currently writing a book about early mammoth discoveries. To comment on anything in archy, send him an e-mail.
The Book progress
My other blog, Mammoth Tales, is all mammoths and science, all the time.
Who is archy? I introduced the patron cockroach, his creator, and his definitive artist in these two early posts.
One.Two.
I've set a deadline for myself to have a book proposal for the mammoth book complete by next week, not counting the perfect polished chapter. This is turning out to be much harder than I thought. I'm terrible at selling myself. However, it has been a very useful exercise to help me clarify the organization of the book in my own mind. Brian Switek of the blogs Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking, has been good enough to give me some very helpful advice. If you aren't reading his blogs, you should, and if you have not yet bought his first book, you should. It's now available as an e-book.
When planning for the coming year, I think it's always safe to say, "this is going to be a weird year." This one, for me, is going to be weirder than usual. It's going to involve some fresh starts with all that that means, for better or worse. I figure I should let you all know what's going on, just case I seem a little bizarre from time to time.
Tessa and I can no longer keep the house. We're fixing it up, getting rid of stuff, and preparing to sell it. After that, we'll each take our share and go our separate ways. Naturally, there is a lot of history going into that decision. We're still very good friends. I'll still be helping with the business (which will be going through its own major changes. More on that in a few days). I hope my friends will remain Tessa's friends and I hope hers will still be mine. This isn't a taking sides sort of break up.
There's a lot of vague and open-ended possibilities there. Meanwhile, a concrete opportunity has come up. Not long after my Scientific Americanguest piece was published, I heard from an editor who was interested in looking at my mammoth book. No guarantees. But, for a first time author with no credentials in the field, getting any attention from an editor is a big deal. At the same time we're preparing the house to go on the market, I'm going to be putting together a formal book proposal and polishing a sample chapter. Right now I have 60,000+ words written, but they are more in the form of essays and fragments than a coherent book. I had already decided to start editing it together this month when everything got weird. Now, I can't let weird life stand as an excuse to procrastinate. It's finals time (that's an academic metaphor, not a sports metaphor. I don't do sports metaphors).
After Tessa and I sell the house and disentangle our affairs, I'm going to be looking for a place to live. For financial reasons, I'm pretty sure I'll be leaving Seattle. Rent is just too expensive here. My preferences lean towards staying in this general area. I like the culture and politics. I know how to get around. And I'd like to keep helping Tessa with the business. On the other hand, I don't have a job, a career, or any close friends here, and my parents are gone. If something promising showed up somewhere else, this is probably the best time in the last twenty years for me to pick up and move.
I'd like to find a place where I could imagine spending the rest of my life, but maybe that's hoping for too much. At a bare minimum, I need a cheap place where the cat and I can hide out for the Spring while I finish the book. Once I have that ready to shop around, I'll be able to think seriously about a job, a home, and a life.
I don't know what's going to happen. All I know is that my life is going to be completely different by Jan. 1, 2013.
It wouldn't be Christmas without a rendition of the greatest carol of all time.
Deck us all with Boston Charlie Lyrics by Walt Kelly, Music by Traditional (whoever he was)
Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo! Nora's freezin' on the trolley, Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!
Don't we know archaic barrel, Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou? Trolley Molly don't love Harold, Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo! Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon, Willy, folly go through!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol, Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you! Chollie's collie barks at Barrow, Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!
Duck us all in bowls of barley, Hinky dinky dink an' Polly Voo! Chilly Filly's name is Chollie, Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, Woof, Woof! Tizzy seas on melon collie! Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof!
Tickle salty boss anchovie Wash a wash a wall Anna Kangaroo Ducky allus bows to Polly, Prolly Wally would but har'ly do!
Dock us all a bowsprit, Solly -- Golly, Solly's cold and so's ol' Lou!
This is a rerun of a post I wrote around this time a few years ago. I think it's still relevant.
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The men in black (MIB) entered UFO lore in 1956 in a book entitled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The author was one Gray Barker who had been a member of one of the first American UFO groups, the rather ambitiously named International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Though Barker's book dealt with a number of paranormal topics, the largest part of it dealt with his former boss, IFSB founder Albert Bender.
In 1953 the IFSB was about two years old with a few hundred dues paying members (called "investigators") who all received the Bureau's newsletter Space Review. The group was doing well enough when, in October 1953, Bender suddenly stopped publication of Space Review, and dissolved the IFSB. The last issue of the news letter gave only this explanation.
STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE: The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by order from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are very sorry that we have been advised in the negative.
According to Barker, the reason Bender had so abruptly ended the group was that three mysterious men in black had visited Bender and warned him off. But before they did, the MIBs were good enough to explain at least part of the true secret of the flying saucers. UFOs, they said, actually come from Antarctica. They have bases in both polar regions and regularly fly between them. Bender told a different story in his own book in 1963.
Enough UFO stories end with the craft departing due north or south that Barker's version of Bender's visitors has been adopted by conspiracy theorists who believe in a decidedly terrestrial origin for saucers. My personal favorite version is that saucers and MIBs are Atlanteans from within the hollow earth, but the theory that they are Nazi refugees from super-scientific bases beneath the ice cap has its devotees, too.
The MIBs are the key to the mystery. The most mundane explanation that has been offered is that they work for the American government and that they are trying to hide the truth about the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs. But that could itself be disinformation. No government has the ability to do what the MIBs do. Think for a moment about the men in black. They have appeared all over the world. They have a special interest in unidentified flying objects and in protecting the polar regions. They seem to actually know what is in the minds of the people they visit. Who has the ability to manage an intelligence network like that? Ask yourself: Who has the ability to travel everywhere, at any time, and even seemingly to appear in two places at once? Who has a special interest in protecting the polar regions? Who knows when you are sleeping? Who knows when you are awake? Who knows if you've been good or bad?
I think you know the answer.
Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and be good for goodness sake.
Many of my science blogger / skeptical community friends seem to be sorry that he's gone. If so, I feel for their loss. But I can't forget that, while he was undoubtably one of the greatest critical minds of the last third of a century, brilliant, illuminating to read, and that I usually agreed with him, he was also a drunken lout, a sexist bully, and, as a late convert to neocon-ism, one of the people most responsible for spreading the exceptionally bigoted trope of "Islamo-fascism." To me, Hitchens was always a great mind that disappointed.
After you were all so good helping me, I know you're a generous lot and will heed another call from a blogger in need. Rumproast blogger StrangeAppar8us suffered a traumatic brain injury on November 3. The injury required surgery, he is still in the hospital, and will need extensive rehabilitation. The injury also left him blind. The bills for all this are going to be astronomical, far beyond the ability of a church bake sale or bartered chicken to handle. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to defray some of his expenses. His fellow bloggers at Rumproast are taking donations to buy specialized computer equipment so that he can start writing again. They are also setting up a permanent fund to help with his ongoing expenses. If you can, send a few bucks his way and help spread the word. Thanks.
Note: This post was selected for last year's The Open Laboratory: The Year's Best Writing on Science Blogs.
In their early days, scientific journals were much more generous than they are today about publishing letters from experimenters and collectors in all walks of life. The hard wall between scientists and amateurs had not yet been built and all literate people were, in theory, entitled to participate in the discussion. One such person was Rev. Edward Lhwyd (or Lhuyd or Lhwid or Lloyd), the illegitimate son of a member of the minor gentry who rose from genteel poverty to become keeper of collections at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (an unpaid position, but important in the community of science). The 1698 volume of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific journal in the English language, contains "Part of a Letter from Mr. Edw. Lhwyd to Dr. Martin Lister, Fell. of the Coll. of Phys. and R. S. Concerning Several Regularly Figured Stones Lately Found by Him." The two-page letter is accompanied by a page of etchings of the figured stones or, as we would call them, fossils.
Lhwyd collected his fossils during a trip to Southwestern Wales. Number fifteen, in his etchings, he found near Llandeilo, probably on the grounds of Lord Dynefor's castle. He wrote of it: "The 15th whereof we found great Plenty, must doubtless be referred to the Sceleton of some flat Fish..." A century and a half after he wrote that, Sir Roderick Murchison would place the Llandeilo rocks in the middle strata of his Ordovician Period. A century after Murchison, scientists would date that strata between 461-63 million years old. That is less than ten million years after the first plants took root on dry land and a hundred million years before cockroaches crawled out of the sea looking for a snack.
Lhwyd's "flatfish." Today we call it Ogygiocarella debuchii (Brongniart).
Lhwyd's identification of number fifteen as a flatfish didn't last very long. Today anyone with even a casual knowledge of fossils will recognise it as a trilobite, something more like a shrimp than a halibut. Lhwyd didn't have our advantage of hundreds of years of fossil studies producing thousands of lavishly illustrated and easily accessible books. It would be almost a century before the word "trilobite" would be coined and into Murchison's time before the scientific world would realize that trilobites were not related to halibut or shrimp (or oysters, another contender) but, rather, something entirely their own. Lhwyd was plunging ahead in the dark trying to make sense of an unfamiliar and mysterious corner of nature.
Lhwyd deserves great credit for deciding his little flatfish was worthy of notice and for sending his drawings to the Royal Society, although, sometimes, he gets a little too much credit. His illustration is the first published scientific illustration of a trilobite that we know of, but he did not "discover" trilobites, as some books will tell you. We should always regard any claim that someone discovered a fossil species with suspicion. Trilobites are extremely common fossils and can be found laying on the surface in many parts of the world. Our ancestors were both aware of fossils and, in many cases, aware that they were the petrified remains of once living things. Usually, what an author means when they declare that this person or that person discovered a fossil is that they were the first to describe the fossil in scientific literature. Lhwyd's illustration certainly counts as a description in that sense, but it is not the first description we know of.
No one can say when people first noticed that fossils were different than other rocks except to say that it was very long ago. The first step in making stone tools is to examine stones very carefully, so it is possible that our ancestors were aware of organic patterns in rocks over a million years ago. For trilobites, specifically, the earliest evidence of humans treating a fossil as something specially comes from a cave near Yonne, France. In the 1880s, when archaeologists were combing the caves of central France looking for artifacts, bones, and paintings, they discovered a much handled trilobite fossil that had been drilled as if to be worn as a pendant. The cave where it was found is now known as Grotte du Trilobite and is also home to paintings of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Because the pendant was handled so much, the exact species of trilobite cannot be determined, however, geologists can say that it was not originally from Yonne. The original owners of the fossil thought enough of it that they carried or traded it from the other side of France. The occupation strata in which the trilobite was found has been dated as fifteen thousand years old.
The oldest known human trilobite artifact from the Grotte du Trilobite.
In the New World, American fossil hunters found plentiful deposits of trilobites in western Utah in the 1860s, but the local Ute Indians had known about them for untold years. In 1931, Frank Beckwith uncovered evidence of the Ute use of trilobites. Travelling through the badlands, he photographed two petroglyphs that most likely represent trilobites. On the same trip he examined a burial, of unknown age, with a drilled trilobite fossil laying in the chest cavity of the interred. He asked Joe Pichyavit, a Ute friend, friend what the elders said about such fossils. Pickyavit replied that trilobite necklaces were worn as protection against disease and bullets. The local Ute name for trilobite fossils translated roughly as "little water bug in stone," indicating that they recognised the organic nature of fossils. Pickyavit then made a necklace for Beckwith in the old style. Since then, trilobite amulets have been found all over the Great Basin, as well as in British Columbia and Australia.
Probable trilobite petroglyph. Beckwith's label reads "A shield (?) shaped like a trilobite."
Joe Pickyavit's trilobite protective necklace made of fossils, clay beads, and horsehair tassels.
Written descriptions of trilobites before Lhywd date possibly from the third century BC and definitely from the fourth century AD. Most ancient literatures include a genre called lapidaries, catalogs of precious stones and minerals along with their practical uses in medicine and magic (often the same thing). Most of the lapidaries included discussions of fossils and one, On Petrifactions by Theophrastus, was entirely about fossils. Sadly, the book has not survived and we know only short quotes from it in the works of later authors. The Spanish geologists Eladio Liñán and Rodolfo Gozalo argue that some of the fossils described in Greek and Latin lapidaries as scorpion stone, beetle stone, and ant stone refer to trilobite fossils. Less ambiguous references to trilobite fossils can be found in Chinese sources. Fossils from the Kushan formation of northeastern China were prized as inkstones and decorative pieces. A dictionary commentary written around 300AD by Guo Pu, refers to these fossils as bat stones because the spines on the pygidium (rear section) resemble the bones of a bat wing. The Khai-Pao Pharmacopoeia, written in 970 refers to the fossils as stone silkworms. Just nine years before Lhywd sent his letter to the Royal Society, Wang Shizhen wrote about the Kushan formation fossils a narrative of his travels in North China.
None of this should diminish Lhywd's place in the history of paleontology. Lhywd's observations were made within the framework of the emerging Western concept of science. The fossils were not interesting oddities that he found in the course of doing something else; they were the object of his outing. Lhywd took an artist along with him on his trip to Wales for the express purpose of preparing scientific illustrations. He communicated his observations to other scientifically interested people with the understanding that they would get further distribution. Finally, Lhywd gathered his fossils and took them back with him to the Ashmolean Museum where others would be able to study them.
As for number fifteen, it's not clear whether the fossil trilobite itself has survived. Modern curators at the Ashmolean have tried to identify Lhwyd's fossils in their collections. They have one old trilobite that approximately matches number fifteen, but they are unable to make a positive identification. The Romantic in me hopes its the one.
The holiday shopping season is upon us. Looking for something elegant, whimsical, and practical to give as a gift? Want to support small businesses? Rather order online and avoid the crowds, parking nightmares, and canned Christmas music? Luckily, there is a solution: Howling Pig Smelly Soaps and Other Stuff! Buy my Clever Wife's hand-made soaps, lotions, and skin-care products. Tessa's scents are unique and wonderful. All of her products are gentle, simple, cruelty free (plant-based ingredients and no animal testing, unless I count), and labeled with an attractive and amusing pig (that I drew). And while you're shopping, don't forget to get soemthing for yourself; you deserve it.
